Heroin has permeated Maine to unprecedented levels. Every week, the Maine Drug Enforcement Agency, or local police and county sheriffs, send news releases about their drug busts. In Owls Head, the March 6 arrest at the airport netted packets of heroin, needles, and cash. In February, it was heroin, plus cocaine, plus pharmaceuticals in Rockland and Waldoboro. In January, it was guns and heroin in Thomaston and the China lakes region.

It’s not just the Midcoast: Sanford, Biddeford, Deer Isle, Bangor, the turnpike, the County — on March 7, two men from New York and Connecticut took a wrong turn, and dead-ended at the Canadian border near Houlton. With no way to back out, customs agents searched the car and found 66 grams of heroin in the wheel wells, with a street value of $20,000. The men said they were on their way to a birthday party but missed the Houlton exit.

The Coast Guard Cutter Campbell returned in early March to its homeport at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, following a 61-day narcotics patrol of the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific. In one month, crews aboard the Campbell seized or disrupted seven smuggling vessels carrying a total of 4,800 pounds of cocaine from South America bound for the U.S. The combined load was worth more than $80 million. 

Boats, planes and trucks are hauling heroin and cocaine over the borders, predominantly from South and Central America. The product makes its way to the New York/New Jersey area, and then some of it heads to northern New England.

“The three northern New England states are under attack,” said Maine DEA Director Roy McKinney. He calls it a struggle between good and evil.

State Attorney General Janet Mills says it is a deadly tide. She has made a call to action: “No one is immune from addiction. No one is immune from overdose. No one is immune from death. We must use every effort to intervene in these people's lives before it is too late."

According to an October 2015 Maine Health and Human Services report, SEOW Special Report: Heroin, Opioids, and Other Drugs in Maine, “heroin use is most prevalent among the southern and coastal regions (specifically York, Cumberland, Androscoggin, Kennebec, and Knox). The rates of heroin trafficking/sales  arrests are highest in the Midcoast.”

This is not especially new news; the presence of Mexican heroin has been spreading across the U.S. for more than a decade, outsourcing Columbian heroin. But it is Maine’s turn to confront what has labeled simply, a scourge.

Besides watching a dramatic increase in the number of heroin users, Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont are recording a heavy increase in the number of drug overdoses. In 2015, 272 people died in Maine from overdosing. That’s a 31 percent increase over 2014, a year that saw a record 208 overdose deaths.

The state is averaging five deaths a week from drugs, and two thirds of them are men, mostly under the age of 60, with the average age being 42.  There are overdoses from taking too many pills, and there are the deaths from heroin and/or fentanyl. The latter has now exceeded the pharmaceutical overdoses, reported the Maine Office of Attorney General, March 7. 

Fentanyl is an anesthesia drug added to the heroin, and makes it 80 to 100 times stronger than morphine, according to the U.S. DEA. The breath of those who overdose slows, becomes more shallow, and stops. 

Opiate nation

After pharmaceutical painkiller use skyrocketed from the 1970s through the first decade of this century, the availability of pills has been reduced. But that reduction has not corresponded to fewer addicts. A population remains hooked on pain medication in a society that is just beginning to wake up to the need for effective medication-assisted treatment.

And whereas in 2010, the Maine DEA traced primary abuse to prescription opiates, that has flipped.

Much of the addiction is to derivatives of opium — oxycodone, hydrocodone, codeine, and many more manufactured by drug companies — all with the morphine molecule that has immense power over mammals, according to Sam Quinones, in Dreamland, his landmark 2015 book about the country’s opiate epidemic.

That molecule, he wrote has evolved to, “somehow to fit, key on lock, into the receptors that all mammals, especially humans, have in their brains and spines.”

The morphine molecule lends a euphoric intensity, then exacts “a mighty vengeance when a human dared to stop using it.”

And while people across the country were getting addicted to opiates, the heroin trade was likewise building.

In 2000, the U.S. DEA, and other federal and local agencies, conducted Operation Tar Pit, a nationwide heroin sting. That bust shed light on just how organized the Mexican heroin trade was becoming. Some have likened it to corporate franchises.

“As Tar Pit took place, out of the east was swelling a wave of opiate use creating vast numbers of new addicts as it swept across America,” wrote Quinones.

Since 2011, the heroin dealers have ramped up distribution. The price has dropped and traffickers are following an efficient transportation system that has been in place since the 1980s, Maine DEA’s McKinney said. 

The dynamics have shifted, however. In the 1990s, it was more common for Maine drug dealers to drive down I-95 to Lawrence, Lowell and Dorchester to pick up drugs and take them back to Maine to sell.

Now, trafficking crews from upstate New York or the Bronx, or Waterbury, Connecticut, or Brooklyn — the list is long — move it north on a regular basis. When someone gets busted, another crew steps in.

“It is a criminal enterprise and money is driving the scene,” said McKinney. “We are not a distribution point. This is a user population. The drugs come north, the money goes south.”

And Maine being the endpoint before the Canadian border, a bag of heroin that might sell for $5 in Southern New England may go for $25 or $30 a bag in Northern New England. In December, the Maine DEA busted a Western Maine ring of dealers accused of importing and distributing 17.8 pounds of heroin over a two-year period. The street value of that was $3.2 million. 

In Mexico, the business is reportedly expanding, with marijuana fields getting plowed under and planted with poppies. According to the U.S. State Dept. 2016 report on the Mexican drug business: “The United State estimates that opium poppy cultivation increased 59 percent in 2014, to 17,000 ha from 11,000 ha in 2013, which could potentially produce 42 metric tons (MT) of pure heroin, compared with 26 MT in 2013. Also, in 2014, the United States estimated that Mexico cannabis cultivation decreased 15 percent to 11,000 ha compared with 13,000 ha in 2014.”

It is a complex issue, McKinney admits, and it is also an awareness issue. His role, as Maine DEA director, is to stop the trade. With 35 fulltime DEA agents in Maine, organized into eight regions, it is a constant task.

Two years ago, there were 14 DEA agents in Maine, but last year, the Maine Legislature approved a $3.7 million drug bill, funds from which added 10 more investigators. In the Midcoast region, which stretches from Sagadahoc County to Waldo County, there are six DEA agents tackling the trafficking, and its spin-off crimes.

Quinones wrote in Dreamland how the narcotics agents learned in 2000 just how organized the Mexican heroin trade was. Management was topped by “rotating squads of heroin franchise upper management.”

Guns are also now a commodity, and a cocaine bust in Bangor not long ago indicated how firearms are now part of the Maine equation. Burglars break into homes where guns are regularly present — it’s Maine, and many people have guns. Or, the dealers get surrogate buyers to make firearm purchases for them in the gun shops. Sometimes, those strawmen are simply users who owe money.

Then, there is treatment, the other battlefront on the opiate war that is energizing politicians and the medical industry.

Maine Sen. Angus King announced March 10 that the U.S. Senate passed legislation to provide for a community-based response to heroin and opioid addiction. He noted, however, that the Senate had rejected an amendment to provide $600 million in emergency funding to fight the opioid and heroin epidemic. 

The Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act is to:

Expand prevention and educational efforts, particularly aimed at teens, parents and other caretakers, and aging populations, to prevent the abuse of opioids and heroin and to promote treatment and recovery.

Expand the availability of naloxone to law enforcement agencies and other first responders to help in the reversal of overdoses.

Expand disposal sites for unwanted prescription medications.

Launch an evidence-based opioid and heroin treatment and interventions program.  

The bill isn't perfect, admitted King. But, he said, it is a significant step.

Tthe fight against addiction is far from over,” he said. “We must do more to meet this enemy head on. I will continue to do all that I can to make sure Maine's voice is heard in this critical and ongoing national debate."

For McKinney, the associated violence and erosion of communities from the trafficking and use is a constant concern.

Homicides, burglaries and home invasions accompany the trafficking, and the result of users desperate for the opiate.

Homicides in Maine have generally been associated with domestic violence. There is now an increase of homicides among people who don’t know each other — “it is now stranger on stranger,” McKinney said. “Part of that is because you have drug dealers coming from more violent areas to one of the safest states.”

Heis looking forward to collaborating more with the mid-Atlantic states and Southern New England to disrupt the criminal organizations in New York.

“It’s like cancer,” said McKinney. “You may get it into remission, but it will be a constant battle.”

 He wants  to send a message to the dealers, whether they are Maine residents or from out-of-state. He simply says, “You’re time is coming.”

Reach Editorial Director Lynda Clancy at lyndaclancy@penbaypilot.com; 207-706-6657